“Mr. Hirsch, I love your book, it puts into words all the things I couldn’t when viewing houses!” Cathy B.

Thanks, Cathy. You made my day.

House design is very intangible. Many times we can feel that things are not right in one house and comfortably perfect in another, but it is hard to explain why. However, there are principles architects employ to make a design cohesive, flowing, and appropriate. Architects deal with scale and composition. Good house design is about much more than putting one room next to another. It’s about balance, proportions and sequencing of spaces. It’s about optimizing space and making spaces fit their purpose. These are things architects study and understand.

In my book, Designing Your Perfect House, I explore these concepts and try to explain them in plain English. I’m delighted that Cathy felt I managed to do that. You can download a few chapters, for free, on my website. Just click here.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

 I understand that your emphasis is on feeling at home in another location other than where you normally live. Others can speak to the time when we feel comfortable with the place, language, and culture. What I would suggest is that the place we reside has much to do with attaining that feeling of “home.”

 First and foremost, home is our secure place. There needs to be an overall feeling of protection and psychological safety. Home is the place we retreat to from the stress and difficulties of the world. Our homes need to express this in a physical way. Think of your own home and think of where you sit when you want to relax, read a book, or watch television. This is your “nest.” It’s the place where your blood pressure goes down and you could easily nod off and take a nap. When we travel, we don’t have this comforting place. However, if we are in a foreign place for extended periods, we can create it.

 A “home” place needs to be the right scale. It needs to have furniture that fits us and feels right to sit in. It needs to reflect what we like about ourselves. Our home needs to express something about ourselves and our lives. We do this by filling it with things we like. Items rich with nostalgia, like family photos and souvenirs from happy times, are important. Even buying local items that catch our eye can help achieve the feeling of home. Travel accommodations are impersonal and can not fulfill the psychological needs of home. Everything in a hotel room or rented apartment or house is either impersonal or personal to someone else. The space was created by someone else and we had nothing to do with it so it is impersonal to us. It helps to spread some of “you” around to personalize the space. Once you find yourself feeling like the place you are staying is your home, the town or country you are in will feel more like home. You’ll be able to venture out into the unfamiliar world, interact with the unfamiliar culture and society, but then retreat to your safe and “homey” personal environment. You will feel at home.

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In a recent blog post by Clem Labine, publisher of Traditional Building magazine and Period Homes magazine, takes on the topic. Here’s a little of what he had to say in his post entitled Hard-Edged Houses for Those Who Love Machines:

Modernist architects once again are trying to sell hard-edged houses to the American public. A new home plan service called Hometta has been set up to offer “modern homes for the masses.” Hometta is a collaboration of several architectural studios whose goal is to provide “small, sleek, sustainable, affordable house plans for middle-class buyers.” Few would quibble with the goals of “small” or “affordable” or “sustainable.” Whether the market will applaud their version of “sleek” and “modern” remains to be seen.

His suspicion of how the public will receive the modernist offerings is shared by me. If you were to poll the public you would find a strong majority favoring houses that match their image of “home.” By that I mean a house with a pitched roof, windows of a human scale, comfortable places for comfy furniture, and not a house that looks like a museum for modern art.

I like to believe that a home-like house can be created in a modern or contemporary style. But nearly every modern house I’ve seen recently is not homey and would not even qualify as good modern design. Last year I was attending an architectural conference in Charleston and we took a tour of “significant houses” in the area. Much to my disappointment we did not visit any houses that were traditional. One after another they were severe, unfriendly and hard-edged. Clem Labine would have hated them. In my book, Designing Your Perfect House, I discuss how to “people” spaces. What I mean by peopling is making the spaces feel right for people to occupy and feel like you would expect people to be there now or soon. This has everything to do with providing the proper scale, materials that are indicative of requiring the human touch, and places where people fit properly.

Modernist house in the Charleston area. This is actually the front side that greets the owners and visitors when they arrive. Not only is the scale, use of materials, and form unappealing to human beings, there is no sense of arrival and the front door is totally invisible. The purplish material is oxidizing copper.

Later in his article, Clem Labine compares the Katrina Cottages by Steve Mouzon to the modernist houses and claims they are meeting the sustainability, cost, and size goals the modernist houses strive for, yet the Katrina Cottages also meet the goal of feeling like “house” and “home” to everyday people (like me). He says:

Ironically, the Katrina Cottages designed by Steve Mouzon offers the emotional reassurance of traditional architecture – but is actually the product of technology and the machine. The cottage is a low-cost modular house designed to be “small, affordable and sustainable.” But rather than an in-your-face declaration of machine-love like the Binary House, the Katrina Cottage offers the softer outlines of traditional architecture and conveys the aura of hand-built houses.

KATRINA COTTAGE VIII by Steve Mouzon/Housing International, Miami Beach, FL

I posted a comment of my own:

Clem – You’re right on the mark. I was trained in a Modernist philosophy, like most architects these days. We get heavily indoctrinated in the mantra that anything traditional must be rejected and modern is the only proper architectural language. I agree with Bob’s comment (author of an earlier comment than mine) that this kind of thinking ignores the lessons learned over the years about how to deal with rain, sun, wind, etc. But more importantly, strict modernism ignores the psychological lessons that are a part of our culture and grown within the human experience. It is pure vanity on the part of architects to say that all that has come before was wrong and only we, the modern architects, can create the forms that properly respond to mankind.

I think that this kind of attitude hinders our profession and is a disservice to the public. I wrote my book, Designing Your Perfect House precisely to empower homeowners and clients to help them understand why they feel the way they do about their houses and help them understand that they can ask for more than what’s on the architect’s menu. The solution to the blight in house design is not simply convincing the architects to do better, but to help the public feel more confident to demand better.

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All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”-Philip Johnson     

    If you asked me to give you a short answer to the question, “What will make a house be my perfect house?” I would have to say this: Everything should just seem to be in the right place. Unfortunately, the word “seem” is pretty vague. So it follows that the characteristics that will create Your Perfect House are subjective, and the concepts are sometimes difficult to grasp. These are the immeasurable, unquantifiable aspects of architectural design.

    These issues relate to emotions and to other sorts of perceptions that can’t be described in feet and inches. It’s a little difficult to get your arms around the concepts we’re going to talk about, which may be the reason many books about designing homes do not even attempt to discuss them. But they are vital for you to be aware of so you can be a full partner with your architect in the design of Your Perfect House. I’ll elaborate upon them in future posts. But for now, here are a few key concepts that take a house beyond simple shelter and elevate it to the status of “home.” 

A Home Needs Sequential Progressions-Our Minds Seek Order

    We don’t like to go from silence directly to eardrum-shattering noise. We can’t stand turning on a bright light when our eyes have adjusted to the darkness. There has to be a gradual transition, a segue from one thing to another. It’s the same when we enter a house. We are most comfortable if the journey from the public spaces outside the front door progresses through a thoughtfully designed sequence of increasingly more private spaces, eventually ending at the most private spaces.  

Don’t Design a Building, Design Spaces

    Architects don’t simply design houses. We design spaces. The house is merely the enclosure and definition of those spaces, both inside and outside the house. We think in terms of spaces more than objects.

    When architects design houses, they are actually creating spaces within those houses that will work for the people who will be living in them. This is what a good architect is trained to understand. This is what he should have a sixth sense about. What will the spaces feel like? What size is right? What shape and character is best?

 Control the Scale-Keep It Human

    A room is a stage for human activity. Rooms become important because of what happens within their boundaries. Because the rooms in a house are meant to contain human activities, they should necessarily be sized to match the intended use and therefore always maintain a human scale.

    Architects always want to create spaces that match the function for the users. Let’s say that Joe down the street has a dining room that’s 14 by 16 feet. Fred wants to build a house that will be “even better” than Joe’s. Fred might say, “Hey, I don’t have to have a 14-by-16-foot dining room. I can afford a room that’s 20 by 24.” After all, isn’t bigger better? Not always, I say. An architect can help you discover the proper size and proportion a room should have to suit the function and the particular users of that room, just the same way a suit of clothes should fit the wearer perfectly or the clothing will feel awkward and wrong.

    Making a house a home is a matter of designing the spaces we live in and not simply erecting a building that will keep the water out and the heat inside. It’s about understanding scale, transitions, progressions, order, and aesthetics.

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    Garage doors are often an unsightly feature simply because of their scale. We human beings tend to prefer objects that are an appropriate size or scale to our own size. The doors and windows of your house will be most appealing when they are size-appropriate to the people who will occupy the house. They will “express” an interaction with other people. On a subconscious level, we can emotionally connect with architectural features like that. Garage doors must, by their very nature, be sized and scaled to the automobiles that must pass through them. Garage doors end up being the largest doors on your house. We find them unattractive for that very reason.

    Being true to his sardonic nature, Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Doctors can bury their mistakes. Architects can only plant vines.” It’s a clever line, but vines can serve a greater purpose for architects than simply camouflaging errors. They can be useful elements that can be integrated into the architecture. Here is an example of vines used to soften the visual impact of three, blank garage doors in an otherwise featureless portion of a house.

Pergola with Vines above Garage Doors

    There was an interesting article in the Raleigh News and Observer today. It was about how the local Universities are going “green” in an effort to attract students. They discussed some of the green projects, especially the green roof at Duke University Hospital.

Green Roof at Duke University

     Photo by Tim Pennigar

    I was particularly struck by these last few paragraphs of the story that note that these green roofs have an emotional benefit. Here’s what they said:

“The roof is receiving positive reviews.

Beth Yoder of Durham, a physical therapist at the hospital, said she notices the green roof as she helps patients walk down hallways. One patient joked that it was the doctors’ baseball diamond.

‘I never even thought about the psychological impact of green roofs in a hospital setting,’ Yoder said. ‘It’s very uplifting. It makes me feel almost more alive and have a more positive outlook.’ ”

I believe that our buildings, and particularly our houses, have a profound and often unappreciated impact on us emotionally. Our buildings can either promote or damage our sense of well-being. It’s an issue I feel we need to pay more attention to than we currently do. Wouldn’t you like you house to be uplifting?

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